Hardware-wise the card came with everything I expect from a video card today. Two DVI-I to D-Sub adapters are a welcome addition, allowing you to use dual monitors in every possible combination. The S-Video Out cable connects to your television, allowing you to play PC games on your televison. eVGA also includes two Case Stickers to customize your case showing off eVGA's logo. The Installation Guide goes over setup step by step, differing modes for dual monitors, basic troubleshooting and quick fixes for common problems, support, warranty and Step-Up information. Software wise EVGA includes a Ulead Movie Factory trial offer (30 days) and the drivers. It’s rather disappointing that EVGA didn’t include full versions of the software.

EVGA really steps up to the plate in the support category in many ways. First, is their Lifetime Warranty. While companies like ATI have lowered their Warranty to only 1 year, EVGA has a Lifetime Warranty for all video cards purchased after June 22nd. In EVGA’s case, a Lifetime Warranty is for the lifetime of any retail Video Card or Mainboard ending with the letters AX, DX, or FX and there is no physical damage to the PCB, GPU/chipset and or components. EVGA says that overclocking will not automatically void the warranty as long as no damage is done to the components.

The second unique thing about EVGA video cards is their Step-Up program. It’s the only program of its kind in the video card market today. Buy any retail EVGA card from EVGA or from an approved reseller, retailer, e-teller or distributor of EVGA products, and you get the opportunity to purchase a new, faster, card within 90 days for the difference between what you paid for the card and the retail price of the new card. Other companies have limited trade-in programs (like ATI’s $50 off for the card, but EVGA is the only company giving you full credit for the price you paid for the original card.

EVGA has another special that might interest you as the purchaser. From now until October 31st, you can get $25 cash back from EVGA AND 25 EVGA Bucks, good for purchasing products from EVGA’s website. With the price of the card hovering around $369 online, plus the Call Of Duty bundle, this makes the EVGA 7800GT the best buy you can buy for any video card released today.

EVGA was kind enough to send 2 cards for a review of them in SLI mode. NVIDIA has released new beta Forceware drivers, 81.84 which I chose to use. Normally, I don’t use beta, Non-WHQL drivers. In this case, the drivers were used for a couple of reasons. First, they fixed an annoying bug with anisotropic filtering. Second, they introduced some new features for SLIing NVIDIA based video cards. EVGA has a built-in tool to change resolutions and image quality settings called ResChanger

SLI is easy to setup. After changing the SLI card and inserting the video cards into differing PCI Express x16 slots on the ABIT NI8-SLI motherboard, I attached power cables to the 7800GTs and inserted the SLI Bridge in between the cards attached to the “Golden Finger” connector for SLI. After installing the drivers the system detected the system as an SLI-Capable system.

NVIDIA just announced a new promotion with their partners including EVGA. Every 7800GT card sold from EVGA including the 7800GT CO I’m reviewing here will be bundled with Call Of Duty 2 from Activision. The game isn’t even released yet and will be released on October 25th. I enjoyed Call Of Duty when it was released a couple of years ago, and the demo that was released a month ago or so. http://www.callofduty.com/